[Fwd: Why not date=? (was Re: ODF and semantic web)]

Bijan did not copy this to the RDFa task force, though the content of
the mail is really relevant for this group, because he proposes an extra
RDFa syntax. (Bijan, I hope that is all right with you.)

My initial reaction on what he proposes: it does make sense. If we
define some sort of a general 'pre-processor' or hGRDDL formalism, that
could be a typical case for it. I would not have a problem saying that a
preprocessor goes through the DOM tree before processing and would
change each occurrence of:

<.... content-date="2007-12-12" ...>

into

<.... content="2007-12-12" datatype="xsd:date" ...>

by delegating that into the preprocessor the syntax document's formal
processing steps might stay unchanged.

Having said that: at the f2f meeting last week we, sort of, decided to
get into a 'feature freeze' mode as soon as possible to get the syntax
document out and on the Rec track. This may be one of those features
that might be relegated into a future version...

Ivan

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Why not date=? (was Re: ODF and semantic web)
Resent-Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 22:35:20 +0000
Resent-From: semantic-web@w3.org
Date: Sun, 14 Oct 2007 23:35:03 +0100
From: Bijan Parsia <bparsia@cs.man.ac.uk>
To: Elias Torres <elias@torrez.us>
CC: Bruce D'Arcus <bdarcus@gmail.com>, Semantic Web <semantic-web@w3.org>
References: <4710D6BC.4080705@gmail.com>
<a707f8300710140338g650a0820m8d1df28db4917b2d@mail.gmail.com>
<47126746.2050200@torrez.us>


I really look forward to Elias's discussion of issues arising from
his experiences working on ODF metadata. I have to say that the
little he wrote thus far is *very* familiar to me.

On Oct 14, 2007, at 8:00 PM, Elias Torres wrote:

> Mark Birbeck wrote:
[snip]
>> It's especailly confusing for authors when this 'inpiration' seems to
>> involve copying some RDFa attributes, but changing the names of
>> others. For example, @about is used, but @datatype has been  
>> renamed to
>> @data-type!
[snip]
>  The ODF Metadata group was so much more welcoming to our  
> perspective as opposed to other non-SW bred groups and us arguing  
> about 'dash' felt to me disrespectful, if not rude.
[snip]

Presumably, as RDFa is not finalized, it could align :)

However, this gets me to the real reason for replying: I'm wondering
if RDFa folks would consider some authoring convenience syntax for
typed literals. datatype="xsd:Bleach" is wretched for authoring no
matter what the syntax. And silly too (the xsd is esp. annoying
since, really, it's a fixed set of names...no namespaces needed).

One could have contentDate, or just date, integer, etc. So the
following spec-example:

<span about="http://example.org/foo"
      property="ex:bar" content="10" datatype="xsd:integer">ten</span>

could be written as:

<span about="http://example.org/foo"
      property="ex:bar" integer="10">ten</span>

Or perhaps some content syntax:

<span about="http://example.org/foo"
      property="ex:bar" content="10i">ten</span>

Or, best, is that one defaults to "aggressive" parsing, so that
things which can be parsed as more specific types than strings are
so, and if you want to force a string, you have to put in an "s".

After all, strings which spell numbers or dates generally are *meant*
as numbers or dates. And it's generally easy enough to get back to
the lexical form, or simply to preserve it.

Cheers,
Bijan.






-- 

Ivan Herman, W3C Semantic Web Activity Lead
Home: http://www.w3.org/People/Ivan/
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